“Ah yes! and she keeps The Red Fox, our one and only inn. Marie, she is the very person to know, for besides being a gossip, she is the landlady of an inn to which a stranger would go even if he only came for the day. Come and let us interview Mrs. Verwin.” Marie assented eagerly, for the search was like a game, and interested her greatly. The pair simply retraced their steps and entered the green space in the centre of Belstone, whence streets and lanes diverged, to behold the shabby old inn facing them directly. It was an ancient Georgian building, ugly without, and comfortable within, and had been more notable in the day of stage-coaches than it was now. Its walls sadly needed a coat of paint, its roof required patching, while both doors and windows would have been the better for a little attention. In fact, there was a half-hearted look about The Red Fox, which showed that the good lady who owned it had given up any idea of making her fortune, and was content to exist for the day without troubling about the morrow. Sometimes tourists stayed in the old place, more frequently artists, attracted by the romantic beauties of The Monastery, for the shabby rooms were fairly comfortable, and the cooking, within limits, was tolerably good. Mrs. Verwin’s money mostly came from the pockets of laborers and yokels, who drank the very inferior beer she supplied while they talked over the news of the countryside in the smoky taproom with the sawdust floor, and cumbersome settles. In the evening when the day’s work was ended, that taproom was the meeting-place of gossips both male and female. And Mrs. Verwin was the greatest and most famous gossip of the lot. How she gathered all the news she did was a mystery to everyone, since she never left her abode, and worked from morning until night in order to keep things going. But somehow she managed to hear all that was going on both near and far, and used her long tongue freely in discussing what she heard. But that the villagers were so somnolent Mrs. Verwin would many and many a time have been in danger of a libel action, but reigning as a kind of rural queen, no one was bold enough to bring her to book. If anyone had dared to venture on such a course, he or she would have been excluded for ever from the taproom, and such excommunication was not to be thought of by anyone who desired to see life. And life was nowhere to be seen in Belstone save under the noisy roof of The Red Fox.